- Thumbnails are one of the most critical elements
to ranking your content and to getting views.
So in this tutorial we're gonna step
through exactly how to make thumbnails
for YouTube videos easy, fast, and free.
(upbeat music)
Hey, it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video,
where we help you amplify your business
and brand with video.
If you're new here,
make sure you click that subscribe button
and all the links to everything we mention in this video
you can linked in the description box below.
So let's jump into it.
YouTube thumbnails are an incredibly important element
of video optimization.
Without an attractive thumbnail,
you won't grab the attention of your potential viewers,
which means you'll miss out on the click and the view.
So fortunately though, there are free ways
to easily create effective thumbnails.
In this video, we're gonna run
through a full custom YouTube thumbnail tutorial
so you can follow along step by step.
Now we're gonna step through exactly how we used
to do it before we started outsourcing our thumbnails.
So while it is a simple process to create your own,
if you are interested in outsourcing,
then I'm gonna share with you exactly
how we do that at the end of this video.
Now probably the biggest misconception
is that you need to be using apps like Photoshop
to create your thumbnails.
So if you've got Photoshop and you know how to use it,
then by all means, definitely go for it.
But you can definitely do it without Photoshop.
Simple apps like even Keynote and PowerPoint
are fantastic for creating thumbnail images.
Mike used to create most of our thumbnails
just using Keynote.
But the process is nearly identical
using a free online service like Canva,
that will work across all platforms.
So today we're gonna use Canva
because it's so simple to get great results fast
and it's completely free.
Okay, now if you're creating thumbnail images
with yourself in them,
meaning that you're going to be pulling a freeze frame
out of the video you have created,
it's a good idea to at the end of your recording,
scroll across the end here,
to actually pose for a few different thumbnail images.
So what I'll do to start out with
is I'll do the cheesy smile.
Point at some stuff, give a couple of different options
so that when I'm coming through here
to find the thumbnail image for our video,
then I can just take a screenshot
or export a freeze frame from here.
Much easier to find than one that's back through here,
partway through a sentence or something,
trying to find something that looks half decent.
So always at the end, try to pose for something.
Pull a few different faces.
Point at a few different things
so that you've got some options.
So for our example here, we'll just use this one here.
I'm using VLC to playback your videos.
You can just choose video take snapshot
and that will save out that freeze frame for you.
Or you can make the video playback bigger
and just take a screenshot of your screen here
and use that as your image.
So if you're on Mac, that's command shift four,
or if you're on Windows you can open up the snip tool.
And we'll just save that to the desktop.
Image.
Okay, so now that we've got our image sorted,
let's jump over to Canva.
And you wanna hit this big button in the top corner,
create a design, which will bring you to this page here.
Now if you come over here to use custom dimensions,
just type in 1920
by 1080 and press design.
There's a heap of preset templates
and layouts and all those sorts of things in here,
but what we're gonna do is bring in our image first.
So we'll hit uploads,
select upload your own images,
find the image that we just saved out,
and that's good to go now to be used in our thumbnail.
So we just stretch that up,
size that up so that it fits our canvas size.
You actually make it a bit bigger than the original size
and you've got a little bit of flexibility
to move it around a bit.
The next thing we wanna do is add in some text,
but generally to make your text pop out
on a thumbnail like this,
I like to add in a shape behind it.
So we'll come down here and go to elements,
then shapes,
and we're just gonna pick one of these free shapes.
I like going the square,
but squashing it down so it is a rectangle.
Bring that up about here somewhere.
And on that box we can change the color
by pressing up here.
And let's add a new document color.
We're gonna paste in our Primal Video color.
So this is where you can keep everything
on brand and to all your brand colors.
And we will add some text.
So click on text,
and in here, again, there's a heap
of different presets that you can use
to just drag these out if you like the way they look.
I will delete that.
And we're just gonna come back up to the top
and just go add a heading.
And drag that on.
We'll type in how to.
And we will make this our font, which is Oswald.
One of these days I should really learn the alphabet.
We'll go bold.
And we will make it bigger.
And I'll resize this box down a bit.
I'll make that font white.
Back to the color picker, and we'll go white.
How to.
Now what you can do here is if you select these two boxes,
the background and the actual font itself,
which we can do just by drawing a box around them here.
Then we can actually group them together.
And once they're grouped,
you can do things like scale it up.
You can rotate them a bit.
So a lot of our branding is slightly angled like that.
So you can move it around.
We'll just get all the text in their first,
then we'll position them so it looks good.
So what we can do if we wanna duplicate this,
we can just select it and come over here to copy.
We now have two of them.
So we can now go how to edit faster.
We might do, so it's easier to edit,
is to select it and choose ungroup.
And then we can edit these two separate.
So we'll stretch this out so it fits, edit faster.
We can then resize the box.
Okay, so we've got how to edit faster.
What we might do for this one,
to mix it up a little bit
is let's just click the background color.
Let's change that to a dark gray.
Maybe we'll make the font white as well.
How to edit faster,
I'm gonna go a bit darker gray.
So you can either pick the preset colors here
or you can add a new color.
And here's where you get to dial it in.
Cool, how to edit faster.
So what we might do here
is just reposition our background image.
We might scale it up a little bit more
and move it over just a touch.
Now we've got more room for the text up in this corner
and again we can change the angles on them.
Maybe we'll scale this one down just a little bit.
How to edit faster.
Now you can also bring in other graphics and things as well.
So we come over here to uploads
and upload your own images.
We'll click the Adobe Premiere logo,
because this is all about how to edit faster.
Once that's uploaded, we will click on it.
You see it's nearly done.
It's uploading here.
We'll click on it.
That will bring it into our project here.
We can scale it up and down.
Maybe we'll put it up in the top corner here
or even actually let's put it
down in the bottom corner here.
So it's all a creative process.
It's all about matching your brand,
but there's one other thing that I would suggest that you do
with your images to make them pop a bit more
here on your thumbnail.
So if we click on our background image,
and we come up here to filter.
And we go to advanced options.
Obviously you can adjust your brightness,
your contrast, saturation, tint.
There's a heap of different options in here,
or there's preset filters.
Think of these like Instagram filters
that you can apply to your thumbnails as well.
What I suggest is that you keep it on normal,
depending on how good or bad your photo is,
and I would boost the saturation just a little bit
so that your colors pop a bit more.
And keep in mind that most people
are gonna be viewing these pretty small
on their screen or on their phone.
So it doesn't actually matter
if it's probably a little bit over the top in this case,
because it's going to look good when it's much smaller.
And the other thing you can do is
to sharpen it up a little bit.
So if you grab the blur slider
and slide it up you're gonna blur,
but if you go the other way,
you're actually gonna do the opposite of it
and sharpen it up.
So I'll probably just add a little bit
of sharpen on their as well,
just to make it a little bit more crispy.
So those are the primary ones
that I would suggest you play with,
but feel free to adjust the brightness, the contrast,
and make any other corrections or adjustments to your image
to get it how you like it.
Cool, so I'm looking at this now, it looks pretty good.
I might actually just do some final tweaking,
and I'd probably make the text here
just a little bit bigger.
Okay, that's looking pretty good.
Just to give an example of the thumbnail images,
most people are actually gonna
be viewing it at this sort of size.
So you wanna make sure that it looks good
at the smaller size,
and that you've also taken into consideration
where the graphic elements and things are over it.
So you probably don't wanna have too much text
in this top right hand corner,
because you can see as they mouse over,
you get the little watch later button.
And exactly the same in the bottom right hand corner
with the time or the length of the video.
So if you've got critical text down there,
then it could potentially be covered up
when the user mouses over it.
So you can see with this one here,
we've put the mouse over it.
It's only covering the Premiere logo.
It's not actually covering how to edit videos faster.
Okay, and coming back to our thumbnail now,
just one more thing I do wanna show you in the elements,
because this a pretty cool design thing that you can do,
is under shapes, you can do some simple things
that are gonna make your thumbnails pop.
Just click another rectangle.
Let's scale this one up quite a bit.
Let's move it off to the side here.
And actually before we do this,
let's rotate it a little bit so it's on an angle.
Let's bring this down to about here.
And we can come up here to the transparency button
and we can lower that down.
So you can start to see the things behind it.
And the other thing you can do is hit arrange.
You can see that our white box is currently
over the top of everything there.
We can actually send it to the back.
So you just keep hitting back
until it's behind all of your elements.
So it's another way that you
can just break up your thumbnails
and add a little bit more polish to them
just by using some simple elements like a rectangle,
and rotating it.
Once you're done, all you need to do is hit download,
choose JPEG, and hit download.
And that's gonna ask you where you want
to save it on your computer.
And jump into YouTube and upload it on your video.
Now earlier in the video, I did mention
that we are now outsourcing our thumbnail design.
So we use a service called Design Pickle to do that.
So they're a subscription design service
where you pay a monthly fee and you get unlimited designs.
So it works great, not just for thumbnails,
but really any Instagram, any social graphic,
branding, PDF guides, banners,
really any graphic design work that you need.
So that's what we're currently using
to outsource our graphic design work.
And there's obviously links in the description below
if you're interested in checking that out.
So now that you've got your thumbnail template sorted,
another powerful element of branding
is animated titles and introductions.
And it's not as hard as you might think.
Check out the videos linked onscreen
for a heap more information on those,
and I'll see you soon.